Quotes About Experience

I learned a lesson I never had as a politician: that we cannot properly lead those with whom we have not shared suffering.

History is the geology of human experience, a study, as it were, of tragedy and comedy laid down in the strata of past lives. In death there are no winners or losers, merely people who once lived but can never live again. What they thought, what they believed, what they hoped, is largely lost. That which remains is history.

Somewhere in the pain there is pleasure, and that is the most awful part, perhaps. (170)

She had been adept at the beginning and the end of things, and now she saw that whatever pleasures life had to offer lay in the middle. She could find some peace there.

Children remember staying up late. Grownups think about getting up early

When you're young, and you head out to wonderful, everything is fresh and bright as a brand- new penny, but before you get to wonderful you're going to have to pass through all right. And when you get to all right, stop and take a good, long look, because that may be as far as you're ever going to go.

She thought of her life, her patchwork quilt of a life, pieced together from castoff scraps of this and that; experience, knowledge, clairvoyance. None of it made any sense to her.

Women do that as they age, they lighten, become air, their souls ephemeral with memory and experience. Men become more ponderous with the passing of the years, heavy with regret.

Reason, Observation and Experience — the Holy Trinity of Science — have taught us that happiness is the only good; that the time to be happy is now, and the way to be happy is to make others so. This is enough for us. In this belief we are content to live and die. If by any possibility the existence of a power superior to, and independent of, nature shall be demonstrated, there will then be time enough to kneel. Until then, let us stand erect.

All great experience has a guarded entrance and a windowless facade.

The pain of growing old lies specifically in the fact that part of us does not grow old.

Young people err through ignorance; but older people err through oblivion to dramatic but simple truths, learned and forgotten a hundred times. The ignorance of the young has the inviting vacancy of the outdoors; but the oblivion of the old is a noxious void behind a sneer of wisdom.

historian C. V Wedgwood, "History is lived forwards but it is written in retrospect. We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only."43

When the customer comes first, the customer will last

I would rather have thirty minutes of wonderful, than a lifetime of nothing special.

If you can achieve puberty, you can achieve a past.

All the new thinking is about loss.In this it resembles the old thinking.The idea, for example, that each particular erasesthe luminous clarity of a general idea.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry. ? Robert Hass, from "Meditation at Lagunitas," Praise ( ? Ecco, July 10, 1999)

Art is, after all, only a trace – like a footprint which shows that one has walked bravely and in great happiness.

There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual- become clairvoyant. We reach then into reality. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom. It is in the nature of all people to have these experiences; but in our time and under the conditions of our lives, it is only a rare few who are able to continue in the experience and find expression for it.

The person lives twice who lives the first life well.

Made me wonder whether putting names to time made much of a difference anyway. What did it measure? Not how much life passes. Hell no. Your whole life can pass and be changed in a second or in a century. Don't matter.

But how do we know? How are we supposed to understand such experiences—and such people? How do we make sense of them? How do we separate the special from the specious? Must we believe everyone's claim unreservedly, or may we doubt, test their veracity, or even laugh out loud at the absurdity of some?

Youth is a disease that must be borne with patiently! Time, indeed, will cure it.